Matthew Turland has posted a call to action for all of those PHP developers out there content to sit back and just request features for the language - get up and get involved!

A question that seems to be popping up more and more these days is, "When will PHP 6 be released?" It's especially annoying because the people that enjoy an exercise in futility ask this question are the same people that simply refuse to take WIR [When it's ready] for an answer. Or maybe they just read into the hype generated by trigger-happy publishers who want to preempt a stable release, I don't really know.

He points out some of the current stats - PHP 5.3's beta release date as coming to the original date, that PHP 6 code hasn't even been moved outside of CVS and the amount of work left to be done on it before its even close to being ready. This is where you come in - the internals folks contribute their time (off-hours usually) to developing the language and can only do so much:

So respect them and their time and stop asking when it's going to be ready, because they don't really know much better [about PHP6] than you do.

He also suggests two other things that you can do to keep up with the current state of development - keep your version updated and track the RFCs to see what features are being added and any bugs that might still be open for pre-release. You have to be proactive about keeping up with the current status - otherwise, you have no room to ask, over and over, "when will it be done?"